Public Schoolings: Too Less, or Too Much, Attention - Essay Example

 The thesis: The thesis is composed of two parts—the last two sentences of the introductory paragraph. 1) A primary task for any reformer should be, first, the identification of these premises, and, second, composing convincing arguments against them. 2) The values which underlie the American system of public schools are those of socialization, subjugation, egalitarianism, and control; such values contradict the values on which this country was founded upon—values of rugged individualism, choice, and hard work to achieve one’s own ends. The prompt of the essay is the question of what values must be changed in order for a cultural issue to receive greater attention. The thesis is that public education is receiving the wrong kind of attention, and the attention it should be receiving is philosophical in nature. Public Schoolings: Too Less, or Too Much, Attention? Of any social issue in the current dialectic, no discussion is as relevant to the future of any given society than the one regarding its education system. As Henry Peter Broughan said, “Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.” What this implies is that the educated citizen can understand arguments, understand the various situations which the country is placed in, and identify its government’s attempts at smokescreen politics. Without a decent system devoted to the education of America’s future citizens, the future itself deserves to be called into question. Weak education poses problems of all classifications: national security, economics, and foreign relations. Needless to say, an education system is no less important than strong civil services, a strong military, or a strong economy to maintaining the stability of an entire nation. But unfortunately, in the United States, public “education”, in actuality, is a misnomer. The environments in which young students enter are not conducive to cultivating the intellect as an individual rational being. Rather, they encourage radical subjugation to an authority figure—whether the teacher, the majority, or, ultimately, the government. There are certain values existing in America which essentially contradict the philosophy that justifies a widespread system of public schooling (the term “public education” will not be used from here on). A primary task for any reformer should be, first, the identification of these premises, and, second, composing convincing arguments against them. The values which underlie the American system of public schools are those of socialization, subjugation, egalitarianism, and control; such values contradict the values on which this country was founded upon—values of rugged individualism, choice, and hard work to achieve one’s own ends. Firstly, however, it may be instructive to examine the sociological concept of cultural values. A value is a subjectively determined principle of normative evaluation. By “subjective”, the definition implies the conditional nature of valuations as they pertain to subjects as opposed to objects. By “normative”, the definition implies that values indicate what is right, wrong, just, unjust, fair, unfair, and so on. A cultural value is an identification of an object or characteristic in reality to be regarded by members of a community as important for some reason. Values relate to norm insofar as norms are particular sorts of actions which correspond to the mind-dependent nature of the value (Crawford and Nicklaus). For example, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance is a norm that corresponds to the value of patriotism that is commonly held by Americans. Values can, in theory, pertain to any aspect of reality that can be considered subjective in nature: whether such principles are of ethical, ideological, social, or aesthetic properties. Considered together, a given culture’s set of consistent values is considered to be a value system (Harrison). Because of its relevance to the foregoing discussion, this concept of a value system deserves greater attention—namely, the possibility of a contradictory set of values within one shared system. When one speaks of “contradictory values”, this means that two values which express propositions so related that both cannot be true and both cannot be false. In other words, such two propositions need to express concepts or meanings which are mutually exclusive in some respect. Consistency, as noted above, is a necessary condition for a set of values to be classified as one of a system. Consistency denotes, according to classical logical systems, (1) non-contradiction and (2) consistent application. A further implication of (2) is that values are sufficiently abstract, and applicable to all situations. By identifying the institutions of public schools as based on values which entail their inconsistent application, the implication shall be that some must be changed (Wenstøp and Myrmel). This conflict is due not to the unknowing advocacy of two values which are inconsistent, but due to the distinction between ideals and action—a distinction that leads some sociologists to distinguish so-called “real culture”—the cultural values reflecting in the actions of individuals, and “ideal culture”—the cultural values espoused by those individuals, independently of any real action (Naylor). For the present considerations, the values which underlie the justification public schools are classifiable as those of real culture, while those which they contravene are those of ideal culture. What must occur is the extrication of these real values, and the alignment of actions with principles. By making professed values consistent with those of real action, we can start to conceptualize the serious problems inherent in a public system of schooling. The common starting point for the Left is to offer the claim that public schooling does not receive enough attention: that it is the government’s responsibility to remedy the situation and their inaction is causing irreparable damage (Reese). The correct claim is that public schooling receives too much attention. Nevertheless, by “too much attention”, one should not interpret “attention” to imply real attempts to cure the problem. Maintaining the classic paradigm of “public schools are necessary” keeps the mind from considering any other alternatives, besides the one which is intrinsically defective. But fixing the problem is not a matter of changing, values. Rather, the correct values are already in America; they have been so for hundreds of years, ever since the signing of the Declaration of Independence: a document which stated the American philosophy of (negative) natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The solution consists of completely removing the contradictions which exist today, and bringing together a value system which is internally consistent in a process of integrating ideal and real cultures. Public school are controlled by government institutions, which means that truth is not a matter of scientific proof or reality, but by what the government approves. Thus, while the world’s experiments with socialism have proven what was inevitable, the complete opposite is happening in public schools. The very structure of the public classroom exhibits the characteristic signature of groupthink encouragement. Eerily reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984, when a child cannot conform to this structure, the school psychologist diagnoses the problem with a quasi-medical condition and prescribes medication to subdue him. And now without resistance, government-run schools push political correctness and random facts on their students, and produce, in the end, nothing but a class of dependents—dependents on their government to tell them what is right. They cannot decide from themselves what they rationally want or need, but must instead rely on what the rest of students think (Iserbyt). When one examines the ideal culture of America, one should find ideals alluded to previously: rugged individualism, materialism (in a strictly political sense), wealth, competition, personal excellence, hard work, accomplishment, and so on. All of these ideals are an expression of the United States’ professed opposition to the kinds of governmental controlling and tyranny that revolution was declared for (Merton). Public schooling rests upon values of equality, positive rights, and ethics of intentions. The institution is popularly defended on these three notions: that (1) everyone deserves the opportunity to achieve his or her “dreams”, that (2) citizens should have certain obligations to ensure this opportunity, and that (3) an action is moral if it is intentioned at achieving a good end. How these values came to be adopted in America’s real culture is unknown, but is a topic beyond the present study. To bring constructive attention to the problem is to question the philosophical premises on which public schools are based. And to actually fix the problem is to logically and thoroughly attack these premises. However, fixing the problem is also beyond the scope of the present study. But the issue of how these values take primacy over others is truly a question of distraction. It is distraction in the sense that some values, because of their contradiction with others, are ignored while others are practiced. And the practice of “real” values are often done so at the expense of those unpracticed—the “ideals”. Even though such distraction is not a product of entertainment or the amusements of modern culture, it is still a matter of ignoring things abstract and conceptual for things concrete and material (Seagoe). To think in terms of analogy, the distinction between real and ideal cultures is akin to the distinction between entertainment in reality: on one hand, a person has reality—a realm of existence which involves the real application of values to real action—and on the other, a person has the imaginary—a realm of non-existence which does not. Public schools require citizens to supply the money to pay for an inadequate, poorly run, useless institution. On the standards of “attention” that public schools receive today by government “reformers”, attempts to make them “better” only requires more taxation and sanction of such a ineffectual institution. Thus, once again, “attention”, as the term is used here, does not entail a discourse on how to fix public schools “Attention” means the right kind of attention, and by “distraction”, we mean the inordinate focusing upon some values at the expense of others—even when they contradict other ones. The solution to the problem of education does not lie in ignoring such a contradiction, or giving into the distinction between real and ideal cultures, or trying to “fix” the problem by “making teachers more accountable” or giving more funding to schools (that is, throwing money at it). The first step to fixing the problem is in correcting, or questioning—philosophical premises—that lie beneath our perceptions and in the way of conceptualizing reality. By doing so, it will no longer be the case that there is no “alternative” to privatizing education and making teachers, administrators, and schools themselves fully accountable for their successes and failures. Only when this is the case will the future of America be secured with the highest standards of education. Works Cited Crawford, George and Janice Nicklaus. Philosophical and Cultural Values: Applying Ethics in Schools. Poughkeepsie, NY: Eye on Education, 2000. Harrison, Lawrence E. Who Prospers: How Cultural Values Shape Economic And Political Success. New York: Basic Books, 1993. Iserbyt, Charlotte T. The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America. New York: 3D Research, 1999. Merton, Robert K. "The Social and Cultural Context." Peters, John D. Mass Communication and American Social Thought: Key Texts, 1919-1968. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004. 215-217. Naylor, Larry L. Culture and Change: An Introduction. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1996. Reese, William J. America's Public Schools: From the Common School to "No Child Left Behind". Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Seagoe, May Violet. A Teacher's Guide to the Learning Process. Denver: W.C. Brown Company, 1961. Wenstøp, Fred and Arild Myrmel. "Structuring organizational value statements." Management Research News, Vol. 29, No. 11 (2006): 673-683. Read More